Lifestyle
The evolution of my computer chronology: Part 1
note: Dates are approximate due to aging and the fact that I don’t keep a journal.
The year was 1988 and it was my first encounter with a computer; an Apple Macintosh 2. I remember like it was yesterday. I was in the 8th grade and I would race home in the afternoon to play Dark Castle. This was the first and last time I have ever used an Apple computer; even though I really, really want one.
Eight years later was my second encounter with a computer and I promised myself to never let that much time to go by again. It was a hand me down IBM computer with a 486 processor that my girlfriend (now wife) gave me. I was in college at the time so I mainly used to write papers, play Solitaire and track my Madden 96 football stats. It was on this computer that I also discovered AOL chat rooms but we won’t go there. That computer lasted me several years!
2000 - My next computer was a desktop HP Pavilion with Windows ME. I loved this
computer and used it for a multitude of projects, mostly web design and
yes, chat rooms. Scanning my hard drive for disk errors was a common
task, even though my computer was never infected. For some reason, I
just liked doing this. Weird, I know.
2002 - I bought a Sony Vaio laptop with Windows XP. It was definitely a
Pentium processor although I can’t recall which one. It was a slick
design and it was the first computer I explored PC gaming with;
Battlefield 1942 and Counter Strike. I didn’t play online quite yet
because our internet connection at that time was a little slow, and
besides, I felt that single player was much more compelling believe it
or not. My Vaio lasted about 3 years until the hard drive crashed. It
survived through several spillages, accidental drops and a multitude of
virus infections.
2005 - Next up were my Dell laptops. Yes, I bought two; and I was able
to justify it in my head at the time of the purchase but I can’t
remember what that was anymore. Anyhow, both were Inspirions but one
was an XPS which I used for gaming. Multiplayer gaming was not only a
hobby but it completely consumed my life. I went through Half Life,
BF2, Rainbow 6, Farcry all in about 6 months time; and pulling all
nighters were common on the weekend. The other Inspirion was mainly for
my wife, which she used for random tasks; Shutterfly, email, and
surfing the net. We still have this laptop today which my daughters use
to play online games on Nickjr.com.
2006 - I took the bold move to build my own computer with the help of a
friend. My XPS just wasn’t cutting it anymore and I needed a new
computer, a desktop with some juice. Online games were exploding and
new FPS (First Person Shooters) games were launching every week and I
didn’t want to get left behind. It cost me roughly $1,200 and a few
hours at Frys. If I remember the specs correctly, it has a Core 2 Duo
processor, an Nvidia 8800 GTX (768MB) graphics card and 4GB of RAM.
All I know is that it was the fastest computer one could have at that
time; and often enjoyed spawning first on BF2 because of it. If you
play FPS games, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Everyone
hated me on those servers and I loved it!
Unfortunately to my dismay,
I haven’t played a PC game in about a year and I am sad. From what I am
told, that computer is still considered to be one of the fastest
although I am not sure how long that will last. I am honestly thinking
about the Core i7 right about now; and not just because I work for
Intel either!
2008 - Just last year I bought an HP with a Core 2 Duo processor and it
was long overdue. Over the last couple of years, I have become highly
addicted to the internet. It’s not uncommon for me to have Sony Vegas,
Photoshop, Twhirl (twitter app), Yahoo! Messenger, Outlook and
multitude of web pages all open at the same time. So speed and
efficiency are important to me. I even bought my wife a netbook so
that she wouldn’t use my machine anymore. Besides, all she does is
surf the internet so the netbook is perfect for her.
It’s quite obvious that new computers are generally faster than older
ones; that’s a given. I just really can’t imagine multi-tasking as much
as I do today on any of the older machines I had in the past. I’d go
mad.
2009 - Not sure what’s next but I am sure something will arise. I’ll keep you updated.
Talk to me – what’s your computer chronology?
I was just reminded that I did play Oregon Trail in the 5th grade or so. I comletely forgot about that. Thanks Gabe!
 |
I have had a little longer story — mine starts in 1981 with a Texas Instruments TI-994A (with 4k RAM) and no storage system whatsoever. I fell in love with BASIC in that machine and would design games that I would then lose as soon as I powered off the machine.
After that I got a Radio Shack TRS-80 which I wasn’t a big fan of.
My love affair with computers was reignited when I got my Commodore64. I became a fan of gaming but doing my own games was still the main focus.
Later on I got an Amiga500 which is in my mind the best computer I’ve ever had. I discovered 3D animation and got into video editing (using the VideoToaster) which influenced my career later on.
I finally bit on the PC for a short bit with Gateway (a desktop and a laptop), but ditched them when Mac OSX came about (Linux programming is my actual profession).
The last thing I own is an MSI Wind Netbook which I absolutely love.
i really enjoyed reading this post. It brought me back down memory lane. I had a similar experience with a few exceptions. I think I am a little younger than you. My first PC was Pentium 4, Sony Laptop.
I am also a gamer and love FPS games. Let me know when you decide to make a come back. I have a BF2 server and would love to have.
you think Intel would sponsor my server? hahaha..
Just wondering…you said (and I quote):
[Quote from Post]
…the first computer I explored PC gaming with; Battlefield 1942 and Counter Strike. I didn’t play online quite yet because our internet connection at that time was a little slow, and besides, I felt that single player was much more compelling believe it or not. …
[End Quote]
So, just wonderin’ how on earth did you manage to play Counter Strike in Single Player mode when it’s an online, multi-player only game?
[Another Quote]
If I remember the specs correctly, it has a Core 2 Duo processor, an Nvidia 8800 GTX (768MB) graphics card and 4 MB of RAM. All I know is that it was the fastest computer one could have at that time
[End Quote]
Wow – a Whole 4 MEGS of RAM? Geeze – I don’t know what I’d do with that much RAM – load up DOS maybe? Because Windows sure wouldn’t load!
@mouse
my disclaimer — note: Dates are approximate due to aging and the fact that I don’t keep a journal.
It was def. just BF 1942.
yeah, someone else caught the 4MB vs. 4GB on twitter and I fixed it.
Sorry – I realized after I hit post I didn’t include the appropriate smiley at the end, so after re-reading I realized I sounded like a jerk…
I do apologize, that wasn’t my intention.
RE Counter Strike: I assumed you were either playing w/ Bots or either creating an empty server and running around by yourself, which would have to be unbearably boring!
(appropriate smiley)
:^)
haha, no worries Mouse. thanks for your comment, btw.
1991: My father was a firm believer in early technology. He’s always been an early adopter… Casettes, CDs, x86 PCs. The first PC we got was a Packard Bell with an Intel i486DX. I was only five, so my memory of the other components were hazy, but I fondly remember toying around in DOS with games like 4D Sports Boxing, Command Keen and Sim City.
We also got wired to the internet almost immediately. It was a screaming fast v.32bis (14.4) dialup connection with WorldWideWeb (WWW). I often played (and was terrible at) MUDs on Michigan BBSes like Fat Agnus and LunarNet.
1992: Our precious computer inexplicably began to run very, very slowly! We were on Windows 3.11 at this point, and we used an early copy Ziff-Davis Winstone benchmarking tool to discover that our CPU was running at 4MHz, not 33MHz! WHOOPS!
We took the computer back to Best Buy and got a free exchange for a brand new computer with the Intel i486-DX2 66MHz. This was in the spring, probably late March/Early April. I remember being so excited!
Many new games were coming out this year, and I added Alone in the Dark to my list of games.
1993: Best. Year. Ever. Doom and Sim City 2000 were released this year, and I battled through countless failed cities and numerous nightmares from the creative mind of a 7 year old in my quest to play more Doom. This is when I knew I was hooked on gaming!
Right around the same time we also decided to try this “internet” thing. Our ISP, WWW, was offering it so we hopped on board. To be truthful, there wasn’t much to look at and we still spent the majority of our time on BBSes. So we dropped the internet for a while. That’s right, I gave up on the internet. Unthinkable!
We still had our trusty Packard Bell, and we continued to enjoy BBSes and gaming.
1995: Having lusted over the Intel Pentium since its 1993 introduction, we were surprised to hear about the Cyrix PR166+ outperforming the Pentium in integer operations. Hell, damn near everything was integer back then. All the games were integer, except for Quake, which was uniquely suited to the Pentium’s strong FPU.
Unfortunately we bought into the Cyrix chip before the advent of Quake (1996), and we bailed on it as quickly as we could when we realized that we couldn’t play this amazing title very well.
1997: Quake is out. We’ve been struggling with a Cyrix chip. It sucks a whole bunch. Quake’s Pentium-oriented FPU-heavy coding makes it slideshow on the Cyrix 6×86.
Meanwhile, all the DOS/early Win32 titles are on the market. Carmageddon, Tyrian, Hexen, Heretic, Doom, Doom II, Quake… I played them all. Voraciously.
I don’t remember the logic, but we were feeling the need to upgrade and decided to spring for an AMD K6-II 233, a Spitfire motherboard and . This began a very, very long fascination with Advanced Micro Devices which would last until spring of 2000.
1997 Pt. II: BROADBAND! Ameritech was deploying an ADSL trial in southeast Michigan, and we were the second customer in the state to receive 1.5/256 ADSL. My addiction to the internet began, and I never looked back.
1998: Quake 2! SLI VooDoo2 12MB and a Matrox Millennia 2D adapter! HOLY BEJESUS. The halcyon days of gaming had begun!
1999/2000: Half-Life, specifically Counter-Strike, had rapidly climbed to fame. I fiendishly stood in line on a Black Friday in 1999 to get my hands on a cheap copy of Half-Life so I could play it on my box. To my disappointment, the measley 64MB of EDO memory and my VooDoo2s could no longer keep up with the pace of gaming. If I played on a server with more than about 10 players, the computer would hit the swap file and I would most assuredly die due to frame/HDD thrashing lag.
I lusted badly after the RIVA TNT2 and the GeForce 256, but it was not to be. There was something better in the works for me
By the fall of 2000, the stars had aligned: The Thunderbird-core Socket A AMD Athlons and the GeForce2 GTS were not only available, but relatively inexpensive. I had been saving for MONTHS on my paper route to contribute money to this new PC, and my father and I eventually went in to purchase a rig with 256MB of PC-133 SDRAM, an Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS, an Asus A7V and an Athlon 800.
GLORIOUS. Friggin’ glorious. I spent unholy gobs of time continuing to frag in rail-only Quake 2 CTF and the venerable Weapons Factory mod for Q2. I also played scads of Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike.
2000-2002: Incremental upgrades to the 1100MHz Thunderbird, and later the 1400MHz Thunderbird kept our system running in top form. We upgraded the RAM when memory prices dropped and increased HD capacity more than a few times.
2002: The Athlon XP was hot on the scene and the Pentium 4′s Wiliamette core was looking weak. We bought into the platform with an ECS K7S5A, Corsair DDR and an Athlon XP 1800+. What a screamer. While ECS is a pretty marginal board vendor, the K7S5A was easily the fastest of its time.
2002-2006: With the Pentium III lurking in servers as the Tualatin, and the prolific Pentium 4 vs. Athlon XP war brewing, I stayed on the side of AMD for a very long time. I couldn’t justify the cost of a Wiliamette, Northwood or Prescott given the dirt cheap prices and relatively similar performance of AMD.
I upgraded incrementally to a GeForce 3 ti500 and a Radeon 9800 Pro. The CPU went from an Athlon XP 1800 to a 2100, to a particularly epic stepping of the XP known as the JIUHB 1700+. I ran that bastard at 2.2GHz until I shelved it and the prolific Abit NF7-S 2.0 it ran on.
Like myself, many enthusiasts had begun to wonder if Intel’s Centrino architectures would ever rear its head on the desktop. We could not fathom what Intel was doing with the super-long pipeline, particularly with the Prescott which was widely and jokingly referred to as the $800 space heater.
In terms of games, I was all over the map: A LOT of EverQuest (Shout out to old members of The Company on Bertoxxulous)! I also continued to play Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and games in the Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and Sim City franchises. I had so much fun.
In 2004, I began my love affair with World of Warcraft which I only recently shelved after nearly 5 years of active play.
2006-Present: Intel did grant their desktop market a Centrino-style chip. The Conroe. Oh lord above, the Conroe. The Core 2 Duo was a magnificent chip. It slaughtered the Pentium 4, it slaughtered the Athlon XP, it made people question the Itanium, it had Sun Micro nervous, it sent SMP Tualatin systems packing.
There was not a single, damn, flaw, with the Core 2 Duo.
Bet your ass I bought one! Core 2 Duo E6400, Asus P5B-Deluxe, GeForce 7950GX2, 2GB of OCZ PC2-8000, a new case, a brand new Samsung 215TW monitor… You know, the works.
I have since incrementally upgraded that system countless times over the years until the present day. Its motherboard was swapped for a DFI LanParty DK P35-T2R/S, the chip was swapped in favor of an E6420 that can do 6*500 (3500MHz), the memory was boosted to 4GB of G.SKILL PC2-8500, the video card got jumped to a G84-core GeForce 8800GTS.
Over these years my fascination with computers and their parts propelled me to write about them, and by 2006 I had begun to do just that. My love of PCs has guided my hobbies, my interests, my work and my writing since then.
2009 & the future: I have that E6420 machine, and I am typing this post on it right now. AMD has fallen on hard times and it’s hard for me to get excited about the Phenom II (even the AM3 Phenom IIs) in the way that the Nehalem gets me excited. It’s hard to deny the siren call of a native quad that I can pair with a GeForce 285, 6GB of PC3-16000 and crank to 4GHz with little effort.
I think I may wait, though. The 32nm Gulftown Nehalems are looking mighty fine. Marry this with more or less official acknowledgment of Windows 7′s Christmas release that MAY coincide with a new generation of GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD, I think 4Q09/1Q10 is going to be a very expensive and exciting time for me.
In terms of gaming/hobbies, I will be continuing with Left 4 Dead, my writing, some nostalgic encounters with Quake 2, old DOS games, NES emulation and a complete loss of all will to move with the advent of Diablo III.
Cheers!
wow, Robert & Michael. how in the world do you have time do anything else?
love this write up. you are very humorous. : )
I think it’s time to upgrade my computer. I am running a Dell with Celeron. please don’t laugh.
Well if you count the first family machine, that was an Atari 800 “computer” back like 1982. My dad refused to buy the Atari 2600 because it was just for games…but all we did was play Centipede, Defender, and Zaxxon.
First machine that was mine was a Mac Performa that I got during my freshman year of college. Performas were their budget level desktops at the time.
Then I received a secondhand Mac 8100 tower that got me through the rest of college and was also what I used to email my resume for my first real grown-up job (PayPal).
I came very close to making the move to Windows after I started at PayPal, but held out long enough for the first Titanium G4 PowerBooks to come out. It wasn’t a great machine, but it restored my Mac fanboy-ness.
Just before Mac announced that they were moving to Intel chips (woo hoo) I picked up a refurbished PowerMac G4.
In early 2008 I finally got my first Intel based Mac (a Mini) and now also have an Aluminum 13″ MacBook.
Also converted my fiance, who had never used Mac in her life, to be a full blown enthusiast!
My first computer was a PDP-8e donated to my high school by CBS Labs in 1974. It was basically mine since no one else used it. Even got keys to the room it was in so I could use it when school was closed. Wasted a lot of paper playing Adventure and Star-Trek on a teletypewriter.
My first “Home” computer was the Atari 800 in 1982. My dad sold them in his store; I got the display version after someone dropped in on the floor. Used it until 1996.
My first true PC was and has always been the Mac. I had a Mac Se, Classic, Centris, Performa. Today I have 5 running PowerPC based Macs: Performa, iMacG3/G4, eMac, and Mac Mini (I have 4 boys that need them).
Unfortunately, I have never had a PowerBook/Macbook. The IT departments of the companies I work for have never supported Macs. Unlike some more devoted Macians, I don’t want to carry around two laptops.
Dave
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Alessandra
Wow, what a coincidence. I just bought a new laptop this weekend and I love it. HP laptop w/Centrino 2, 4 gigs of RAM, 250 gig hard drive. I am typing on it now.
It’s been a long time coming. It’s been 3 years since I bought a new computer.
Excellent post.
My compu-ography is a long and straight path, it charts a segment of the dying days of the British computing legacy to the world, several converful operating systems, a lot of large machines and then for some bemusing reason I became a real intel CPU fanatic, so where to begin my tale… okay, go back to 1983, I see a spiral bound book, my Dad and Uncle both in their mid thirties fingering through lines of code to make the “Commodore C16″ do something. This was the Commodore Basic interpreter built into every machine, and I think the lines ’10 print hello’ and ’20 go to 10′ got me some real hate as I was only six.
Next after six years of loving the commodore and the funny whiry sounds the twenty minutes of audio-cassette loading made I met my next computer an Atari 520 ST fm. A fantastic machine, which took me from 1989 all the way to 1994. Many games, desktop publishing and even teaching me Pascal programming, I still have two ST machines at home today, for nostalgia purposes.
I then met my first PC, an Intel 80486 SX 25, at college. I loved these machines they seemed so fast and perky compared to the ST I still had at home, I soon had myself an 80486 SX2 50. TWICE THE POWER (be impressed, be very impressed).
This machine had several upgrades, including a Dual-Speed CD-ROM drive, it leapt from 4mb of ram to 8mb!
Then it had an 80486DX2 66 chip installed, OMG the power, then a DX4 100 chip…. I loved the machines at this time, and then I met a Pentium class machine. I had to have one.
Soon an Inten Pentium 60mhz was sat purring on my desk, it out performed the DX4-100 easily. And with a blistering 16mb of ram and a dedicated 4Mb graphics card it smoked performance in 1996.
By 1997 I had sprinted through several other machines, going in quantum leaps from an Intel Pentium II 400Mhz with 32Mb of RAM and a Voodoo 3DFX graphics card. This machine soon needed upgrading, and I had the choice of a cheap Cyrix based machine a new kid on the block called AMD had an offering in the Pentium III class, or I could stick with Intel. At the time I was slated for this, the Pentium III was supposedly slower than the rival offerings.
But the Intel offered such simple straight horsepower, while all the other offerings had bursts of higher speed, they did not sustain it.
So I found myself the proud custodian of an Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz, on the all new Slot-1 connection method.
From 1998 to 1999 I constantly upgraded this machine, it ended it’s days with the latest Intel Celeron 800Mhz mated to a Slot-1 riser card, and a whopping 256mb of ram.
For the millennium however I found myself enjoying being the custodian of an IBM AS400 Mainframe computer, I never want to see those machines again.
I think that celeron lasted me at home for a long time, until a game called Battlefield 1942 came out, and I just HAD to play that game.
I found myself picking up and building an Intel Pentium IV 3.0ghz machine, with a gigabyte of ram, and Hyperthreading. I love this machine, I still use it as my gaming VOIP server for everyone to join me on. With an upgrade to 4gb of RAM it still competes with my slow Core2-Duo laptop.
Yes, this is where I thought I would pick up a lappy, a Dell (urgh – but it was cheap) with Intel Centrino Core2-Duo at 2.8ghz and a gig of ram, it now has 4gb of ram, but running 32bit Vista you don’t really notice if you have more ram, it’s always dog slow.
So last year I spoiled myself and went for a whole new chasis and upgrade, an Intel Core2-Quad machine. The then dogs danglies. The machine is currently happily running Windows 7 64bit (beta), included in the rig I have nVidial 8800′s in Sli configurations and 4GB of RAM. The machine does everything I need of it at present, from Games, to Movies, to Sound Recording. And all without sweating.
What the future brings me?… I don’t know, anyone there at Intel up for swapsies? One of my Atari ST’s with 2.5MB of RAM and the wonderful encarnation of CPMx68000 that is GEMTOS…. for a Intel Core i7 Extreme?
Years may be off a bit – no overclock on any of these configurations – I don’t recall some of the details.
1981 – VIC-20, TV for a monitor
1983 – CBM 64, CBM 1541 disk drive, CBM Monitor, MPS 801 printer, later MPS 1000 printer
1983 – Apple IIe, 2X floppy drives, Apple IIe monitor
1989 – Tandy 1000 HX, 640 K RAM, 2X 3.5 floppy drives
1990 – 386 SX 25 (built this one), 512K RAM, 80MB HD
1990 – Amiga 500 (1 MB RAM), 2X 3.5 floppy drives
1991 – AST 486 SX 25, 1 MB RAM, 170 MB HD
1993 – AST 486 SX with P24T 80MHz Pentium Overdrive, 4 MB
1995 – Insight Pentium 120 MHz, 1.6 GB HD, 8 MB RAM, Diamond Stealth 2 MB video card
1998 – Gateway Pentium II 350, 16 MB RAM, 4 MB Voodoo Monster 3D FX, 20 GB HD
2001 – Hewlett Packard Pavilion Pentium II 650 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 16 MB nVidia Vanta video, 40 GB HD
2000 – Dell XPS 1000R, 1 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, GeForce256 64 MB (Dell Edition), 2X 12MB Voodoo II, 40 GB HD
2002 – AMD Athlon XP 1300, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 3
2003 – Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 2 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB RAM
2005 – Upgraded 2003 computer to X850, 256 MB RAM
2006 – Upgraded 2003 computer to X1950 Pro, 256 MB RAM (old card failed)
2008 – AMD Phenom X9850, 4 GB RAM, nVidia 9800GX2 (512 MB RAMX2)
2009 – iCore Extreme, 8 GB RAM, 3.2 GHz, nVidia 295 GTX
I’m looking into getting a new computer right now, currently all i have is a vaio laptop with core 2 duo 1.83 Ghz and I really need a gaming machine. I know computers and have built them from the motherboard up and am very aware of how much money that saves. I’m in dire need of a gaming system and I love Nvidia SLI technology and would like to get a GTX 295 and a cpu that wouldn’t bottleneck it, most likely an i7 Extreme Generation 695 with 6 GB DDR3 RAM but it’s a tad pricey. I only have the cash I can earn over the summer (still in school) so I’m looking for something below $2,000
I’m pretty much set on the Graphics card(s), processor and RAM but I’m not quite sure which motherboard is best, right now I’m looking at http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-132-BL-E758-A1-Motherboard-Tri-Channel-Utility/dp/B001KX8VES/ref=pd_cp_e_2?pf_rd_p=413863501&pf_rd_s=center-41&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B001ISJONM&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0EZCZN5KTK3HNCN7YQFB
but I haven’t done much research. Also of course I’ll need a box to stick all this stuff in, preferably something big with room for at least 2 graphics cards and a nice cooling system (an awesome lighting system would be a big plus, I mean I’m getting the thing to have great graphics, that means I care about looks, right?)
Anybody got any input or suggestions about where/what to purchase (or not?)
Xaque
Xaque – you should check out my
Core i7 Blog :)
Intel has always made remarkable computers and laptops.
Hey I just acquired a motherboard with an i486 processor and some kind of ram I have never seen before. The guy I got it from said it still worked and I dont see any physical damage to the motherboard. This was made before I was born! I was just wondering if anyone could tell me exactly what I have. As in, how valuable, how much its worth, what I need to get it running and so on. I dont really plan on selling it but I would like to know exactly what ive got here. I have kind of started collecting old/vintage electronics but have never seen anything like this.